


wicks

by riceCRISPRtreat



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Executive Dysfunction, M/M, neuroatypical character, panic disorder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 09:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14493621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riceCRISPRtreat/pseuds/riceCRISPRtreat
Summary: Newton Geiszler is great with a deadline.





	wicks

**Author's Note:**

> Uprising, What Uprising? Contains descriptions of panic attacks, canonical violence, and academic jargon. Many thanks to AozoraNoShita for the beta; any remaining mistakes are my own.

/////

Unsurprisingly, Newt wakes up to an angry email from Hermann. It’s just about the fifth day in a row he’s decided to “work from home” on account of the fact that everything important is over, forever and ever amen, so what’s the fucking point. He’s been dreading a Hermanic call-out since Day Two of the campaign to quietly fester to death in his Shatterdome efficiency studio, and it’s honestly kind of a relief to get it over with.

To: Dr. Newton Geiszler  
From: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb  
Newton,  
If you do not come in to lab today, I will file a report with the Marshall.  
Hermann Gottlieb.

newton.geiszler: oh my god, hermann, they installed this horrible im app on our computers for a reason  
hermann.gottlieb: Do I need to remind you where the shift key is again, Newton?  
newton.geiszler: yes  
hermann.gottlieb: Judging by the number of samples still putrefying here in the lab, I gather you have not organised any kind of effort to have them stored.  
newton.geiszler: why does that have to be my job  
hermann.gottlieb: Because you are the laboratory director of the Shatterdome K-Science division. It is literally your job to decide when, to where, and how your lab is to be stored and transported.  
hermann.gottlieb: You insufferable layabout  
hermann.gottlieb: Additionally, Marshall Hansen asked for our organized data files over two weeks ago. If you do not collect them and send them by next week, I _will_ exploit your server’s security vulnerabilities and do it myself.  
newton.geiszler: promise?

Hermann signs off after that, presumably in disgust.

It’s not that Newt is lazy, per se. He can work thirty-six hours straight like any other bench scientist who’s had to alternate reservation times on a CyTOF machine, the SEM, and the supercomputing cluster as a graduate student. “Burning the candle at both ends” is a phrase more than one of his mentors over the years have used to describe his work ethic, and since Trespasser did its thing all over San Francisco, he’s been like, an agglomerated candle with six separate wicks, all of them burning.

_Am I…burnt out?_

No. Categorically impossible. Newton Geiszler is a science god among puny science mortals. His wax is infinite. His wicks are multitudinous. He is _going_ to make it into lab today.

Right after he finishes scrolling through every single social media website he has an app for.

“This is a cancer,” he mumbles into his pillow, lying on his side and scrolling continuously. It’s his third perusal of the latest news on kaijubelieveit.com, which is a predictable stream of “WORLD SAVED” headlines with a peppering of speculation about the nature of Mako Mori and Raleigh Beckett’s relationship. Newt copy-pastes every sentence that mentions his name into an email draft to his mom that he will definitely never send. Then he switches gears to retractionwatch.com, which he’s been refreshing obsessively ever since Mutavore crashed through the Wall of Life and invalidated five years of fear-biased, civil engineering proof-of-concept circle-jerking, the portfolio including something like forty journal publications and forty-thousand news articles, a great proportion of which were funded by and/or feature quotations from Hermann’s asshole father. It’s going to be extremely gratifying to watch all involved parties wring their hands as their careers come crashing down around their ears (much like the Coastal Wall had come crashing down around Sydney!).

It’s suddenly an hour later, and Newt is still in bed.

Okay, so. Two things that grad school and saving the world had in common: an interesting goal, and a defined endpoint. Interesting goal: make a novel scientific discovery/save the world. Defined endpoint: defend your thesis/total annihilation (of one species or another).

Newt just can’t get it up, intellectually, for something so mind-numbingly banal as organizing samples and hiring people to move them and telling them where to move them and explaining his extremely complicated labeling system. He doesn’t want to make a shitty SQL sample database, because that’s going to take him _literal_ days, and he doesn’t want to digitize his thirty-seven lab notebooks, because _ew_ , and he doesn’t want to formalize and report his discoveries re: T-cell engineering for auto-immunological warfare, because if the wrong military dude gets his hands on that, World War III is going to be extremely fucking horrifying.

_Institutional busywork_ is one of the reasons Newt got six PhDs instead of settling down with a nice NIH grant and a lab of underlings to do all the real science. He isn’t a lab manager. He literally doesn’t care. Somebody else needs to deal with the logistics, he’s too busy getting his gloves dirty in kaiju entrails and loving every second of it, fuck you very much.

His laptop pings from the bedside table.

To: Dr. Newton Geiszler  
From: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb  
Newton,  
You have forty-five minutes.  
Hermann Gottlieb.

“Fuck you, Hermann! You’re not my PI!” But he shuffles to the shower anyway, because sometimes you need somebody else to be your superego, and Hermann’s always willingly stepped up to the plate where Newt is concerned. With inexplicable enthusiasm.

In an uncharacteristic show of courtesy (or, more accurately, in a show of avoidant self-preservation), Newt continues to not probe his memories of the Drift to understand what Hermann’s damage is, “damage” here being a stand-in for “weird inclination to view Insufferable Layabout Newton Geiszler in a fond slash sympathetic light, and totally failing to express this in a straightforward and interpretable manner.” If Newt had had to work with a guy like Newt, he would have let him self-destruct years ago, if not actively encouraged implosion. So it was weird to suspect and then later confirm in the Drift: Hermann _cared_ about him, in a generally positive type of way.

So he girds his loins for the existential ennui of being in lab and not doing science, for Hermann. Who really wants him to be able to walk away from the PPDC with a shining recommendation in hand. Who is inexplicably invested in Newt’s personal and professional well-being. What a guy.

/////

“Your lack of work-ethic is sickening,” Hermann says when he walks through the door. “If it were at all possible to decode your sample labelling conventions, I have no doubt that Marshall Hansen would have already fired you and hired someone with an ounce of competency to pack away the gore you call your body of work.”

“Good morning to you too, Hermann.” Newt starts another pot of coffee, even though it’s like one-thirty in the afternoon. The lab shelves are stacked high with equipment, from pipette tips to beakers to empty well-plates. Then there’s the shelf labeled “Rack City Bitch” that houses his test tube racks, themselves labeled things like “we will rack you” and “racky horror” and, for Hermann’s amusement, “rackmaninoff.” This type of laboratory detritus will be easy to pack away and release back into PPDC inventory, and maybe he can request authorization to hire a temp worker to get started on that now.

The tricky part is going to be the kaiju samples. There are a few body parts in the lab’s mini-freezer that Hermann loves to bitch about, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg that’s about to sink Newt’s career – the walk-in freezer in the basement has nearly three hundred tons of organic matter, split up among both intact organs, like the Mutavore kidney labeled “G’day Bean” and the Otachi kidney labeled “Mama Bean,” and then there’s the thousands of plated kaiju cell cultures labeled according to the lunar calendar, e.g. “4Wolf2020” and “16Worm2023,” and stem cell type as either “MBC” for “Maybe Basal Carcinoma” or “FYI” for “From Yamarashi’s Intestines,” and then there’s other random tags like “looks like we got another toenail” and “Yikes - ears”, and it seems like Newt may have fucked himself over royally because it’s going to take years to translate this into something the military-industrial complex will accept and he’s never going to be able to leave this place unless he does it in the dead of night burning bridges like he always does youidiot-youloser-youstupidgoddamnwasteofspace –

Inhale. Exhale. It’s okay Newt, it’s okay. It’ll get done.

He turns to the other side of the room, where Hermann is placidly plucking away at his keyboard, occasionally scratching in his graph-paper notebook. The walls are bereft of the old floor-to-ceiling chalkboards, the shelves empty of stats textbooks, overengineered holographic display machinery gone from his desk.

“Hermann, what are you even still doing here?”

Hermann looks up, over the top of his ridiculous half-moon reading glasses. His expression is severely unimpressed with everything Newt chooses to be. “Putting together three manuscripts to submit to the _Annals of Mathematics_. It ought to give me a jump on tenure negotiations.”

“Oh. Neat.” Newt is literally going to throw up in a few minutes. He puts his coffee down.

“And what’s on your docket for today?” Hermann asks lightly, turning back to his graph paper sketches to obviously feign disinterest.

“I think I’m gonna start making a sample database, with translation tables so nobody can bitch about my totally awesome naming conventions, _cough Hermann cough_. And I’ll include a column for ‘eventual_destination,’ so I can fill that in when Herc figures out what the hell we’re supposed to do with three hundred tons of extremely rare temperature-sensitive alien specimens. Hey, d’you think Hannibal Chau’s gang would pay good money to take them off my hands?”

Hermann’s face is only halfway to apoplectically purple before he realizes that Newt is fucking with him. The Drift has taken away some of the simpler pleasures in Newt’s life, like goading his lab partner into hours-long arguments to avoid unpleasant tasks. “Keep your outrageous musings to yourself, Newton.”

Newt gets to work, trying not to think about Hermann’s tenure negotiations. Where is he going? Can Newt follow? That’s a really weird thought, the etiology of which he is definitely _not_ going to examine; and anyway the answer is no because Newton sucks at ingratiating himself to people, and also Newton sucks at a whole other host of things PIs are supposed to be good at, and also Newton is going to be stuck in the Hong Kong Shatterdome forever relabeling samples and hiding from the future in his bedroom.

/////

The thing is, Newt still falls asleep shaking.

It’s heinously unfair that Hermann is so composed, so stiff-upper-lip, so British and proper and ordinary, when his brain had recently been networked with Newt’s own fucked up tangle of neurons and, oh yeah, a _baby brain_ and its accompanying hostile alien _hivemind_.

Even after trashing his mind like a hotel room to save the world, the crazy son of a gun just, like… got back to work, cleared out all his books, organized scripts and their output and packaged it nice and neat to send to the higher-ups, and now he’s writing it up to enrich his future career, which he has the mental fortitude to be proactive about right now. While Newt still only gets out of bed one day in every three, and has panic attacks when he thinks about all the tedious bullshit he has to finish before he can get out of here under good graces.

He eats alone in the mess hall, returns to his cave, sets the shower to “autoclave,” tries not to look at his tattoos.

No, y’know what? This is ridiculous. Newton Geizsler, PhD(x6) is not some pathetic layabout who can’t get his work done. He has gotten so much work done in his life. He does his work, that’s what people say about him. That’s his thing. His brain is a paragon of getting work done, sometimes at the last minute and against all odds, but it gets done. Just because he isn’t thrilled about this particular job doesn’t mean he can’t do it.

The trick, he decides, is forcing a deadline. Newton Geiszler is great with a deadline.

To: Hercules Hansen  
CC: Dr. Hermann Gottlieb  
From: Dr. Newton Geiszler  
Marshall,  
Sample organization going well!! Currently making a database with label, contents, location, and handling requirements of each sample in the sub-basement freezer so everything can be moved without my supervision. Expect it in two weeks, data files coming soon after. Hold me to it.  
-NG

There. Now there’s a sense of urgency to the whole thing, which ought to be enough to get him out of bed in the morning. He turns off the light and curls in on his side, scrolling on his tablet for hours, hoping that he’ll get exhausted enough to fall asleep without having to think too hard about anything. He rereads Hermann’s thesis for approximately the fortieth time, now with an addictive layer of nuanced understanding courtesy of the Drift. He then proceeds to read every single Gottlieb publication he can get his hands on, even the undergraduate ones in German.

He still falls asleep shaking, and wakes up covered in a cold sweat, feeling a phantom pain in his femur, feeling like he can’t breathe, like he’s being strangled, like he’s heaving and struggling and tightening the rope around his neck.

Newt doesn’t get out of bed in the morning.

/////

_It’s_ okay _it’s_ okay _it’s_ okayit’s _okay_ , it’s okay, it’s _o-kay_.

Inhale. Exhale.

Newt is doing the damn thing. He is getting control of his breathing, like the genius he is, like a functional fucking human being, before this becomes the kind of fully-blown panic attack where darkness creeps in at the edges of his vision and he calls the cops because he might actually be _dying this time, okay, but I really think I might be._

The lights are off. The digital clock faces the wall. Newt listens to some ASMR and pretends it’s a reasonable hour to be going to sleep for the night.

Obviously, he needs to sort his shit out. He hasn’t been this unstable since the disastrous six months between PhDs three and four (biomedical engineering and immunology), when he’d made the mistake of reconnecting with his mother and she’d pointed out that academic accolades didn’t preclude one from being a failure of a human being. (She was right, of course, and that’s what had made him a wreck for the summer.)

What he needs is to surround himself with people who like him. People who want him to succeed, but who also won’t put up with his evasive bullshit. Like Hermann.

At the knock on the door, Newt buries himself deeper under the covers.

“Newton? Are you in there?”

Having just decided that spending time with Hermann is exactly what he needs to get back in control of his life, Newt is hiding from him. Because he’s the stupidest self-aware self-saboteur on the planet.

“Newton?”

“Uuuuugh, go away, I’m sick.”

There’s silence on the other side of the door. Then, “Have you eaten today? I can bring you something from the cafeteria.” A beat. “Would you eat soup?”

Jesus, he’s obviously fucking lying, and Hermann knows it. Why does he have to be all sympathetic and accommodating? Newt does a hiss/yell combo thing that comes out sounding like a Predator clicking noise. “Dude, I’m obviously fucking lying. Let me fester in peace.”

Silence, and then-

_BANG._

“I .” _Bang._ “Will.” _Bang._ “Not.” Hermann continues to wallop the metal door very rhythmically, presumably with his cane, which is not doing Newt’s blood pressure any favors. No variation on the theme of “I’m begging you to please stop” is getting Hermann to stop, so he struggles into his skinniest black jeans and halfheartedly slings on his skinniest black tie and pretends that he hasn’t spent the past seventeen hours languishing in bed.

When he opens the door, Hermann shoves his way in and immediately _goes for the throat_. Newt staggers backwards in alarm.

“Calm down, I only want to fix your terrible tie,” Herman mutters with a theatrical eyeroll.

Newt laughs nervously. “Oh, you want to fix my– _oh_. Okay, yeah, sure, go right ahead.”

He steps forward into Newt’s personal space, hints of his cologne and aftershave filling the air between them. Hermann’s hands gently but firmly undo the messy knot. He partitions the ends carefully, looping under and over, expression betraying nothing but concentration as his hands smoothly and without shaking pull through a perfect Windsor. Newt, on the other hand, is breathing manually, and his mouth is filling with saliva that he’s afraid to audibly gulp down, and he’s pretty sure that if he lifted up his hands right now they’d be shaking like leaves on a tree in a hurricane. Hermann’s face is perfect and calm and _understanding_. It isn’t fair.

“I saw your email to the Marshall,” Hermann says quietly.

“Dude.” Newt squeezes his eyes shut. “Let’s not.”

Hermann kindly doesn’t point out that Newt had CC’d him in a fit of unjustified smugness. Instead, he smoothes down the (now impeccable) tie and regards Newt with a gaze that is far too shrewd. He still hasn’t stepped out of Newt’s personal space. “Do you recall the time you tried to coerce yourself into becoming fit by signing up for a two-hundred mile relay race with your marathon-competitive lab members?”

Newt struggles to respond, lost in an absent-minded consideration of the straight and perfect smallness of Hermann Gottlieb’s nose. “They…they named their team ‘Running a Gel,’ okay? Do you think I have the kind of self-control to pass that up?”

Hermann visibly searches through his Drift-rendered catalog of Newtonian expertise to understand the joke, and then visibly dismisses it as idiotic. “Newton…you can’t just force yourself to accomplish impossible tasks by promising other people that you’ll do them.”

“What! Impossible?! I could totally run twenty miles over the course of a day if I wanted to!” He pauses, considers. “Given some time to train.”

“Yes, but you didn’t spend the time training, did you? As I recall, you spent the three months leading up to the race eating more than your fair share of cafeteria pudding and perpetually claiming you’d start your intensive regime quote unquote ‘tomorrow.’ You then mysteriously vanished two days before the race, and only reappeared after your teammates had divvied up your miles among themselves.”

Newt feels only exhaustion where bottomless pits of knee-jerk outrage once dwelled. “Yup, you’re right, Hermann. You got me. I am a massive flake with no discipline.”

Hermann looks taken aback by his bitterness. “You know I was only…I was only ‘giving you a hard time,’ as they say. Let’s go get lunch, hmmm?”

Oh god, Newt is definitely losing it. His pitifulness is so complete that it’s derailed Hermann’s most basic instinct: castigation. This is an all new low. Hermann snatches up his cane from where he’d leaned it against the wall and softly thwacks Newt on the backs of his calves.

“Jesus! Ow! Can you not?”

“Then would you kindly hurry up? We have a long afternoon ahead of us in the basement freezer.”

Newt stops at the threshold of his apartment. “ _We_?”

“Yes, _we_. Why do you think I’m wearing this parka?”

“Okay, first of all, you wear that a lot of times when it isn’t necessarily appropriate. I honestly didn’t even notice. Second of all, _why_.”

Hermann just prods him again with his cane. “Don’t play stupid, Newton.”

/////

One and a half weeks later and Newt is officially on track to make his self-imposed deadline ahead of schedule, thanks to a case of Red Bull and a couple of sleepless nights. And, okay fine, the few times Hermann followed (slash led) him to the basements hadn’t really hurt. Sometimes Hermann hummed along to music he’d once referred to as “infernal racket,” and he didn’t even switch it off during Newt’s entire heartfelt serenade of “Getting in Tune” by The Who, even though the air drums/air guitar/dramatic pointing clearly made him uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, Newt is now even more boned in the whole Feelings Department.

For a while now there had been Feelings. The correspondence in their early twenties, though officially nothing more than an exchange of cross-disciplinary expertise, could safely be described as _torrid_ ; and even after they’d met in person and totally exploded each other’s respective fantasies of camaraderie, Newt wouldn’t have said no to some hate-fucking. A decade in close quarters had deepend all of these feelings - the admiration, the irritation, the angry sexual tension - and then dumped a layer of familiar fondness over it all.

And then, the Drift.

They were already far closer to each other than two isolated geniuses could have ever hoped to be, and it was an uncomfortable novelty for everyone involved. Pride had been the last wall between them – it’s what the bickering was designed to maintain. But now Newt has secondhand memories of being a kid at boarding school and having his books stolen, of longing so deeply and so fruitlessly to understand, to be understood. Remembers the diagnosis, the surgeries, the months bedridden and essentially paralyzed from the waist down. For his part, Hermann now has secondhand memories of losing his mind in a series of hotel bathrooms at academic conferences, knows the mile-long, oft-ignored prescription list, knows the name of every alienated professional contact, has felt the morning-after shame of every dramatic reenactment of academic suicide committed across all six fields.

And then. In the Drift, Newt saw himself through Hermann’s eyes, and for the first time in his life _did not find himself wanting_.

They’d once been too proud to directly acknowledge the admiration, the fondness, the softness. But after everything they’ve seen and done, what’s left to hide behind? What room for pride?

/////

They’re having a coffee break in the mess when Tendo and some Category IV Buff Military Dude—“His name is James, Newton”—summon them to Command for a conversation with Herc Hansen.

“Any clue what the boss wants from us, Tendo?”

“He just finished a meeting with the bigwigs a few hours ago. The FCP—man, I can never remember these acronyms. First Committee of the Pan-Pacific Nations or something. One of the ones your dad is on, Dr. Gottlieb.” Hermann’s expression sours at the reminder. “He has more specific information on what’s going down with the ‘dome and everything in it – I guess he wants to help you guys figure out where to go next.”

“How considerate of him,” Hermann says sincerely.

“The Marshall is a good man. Only a little bit of a fascist, even.” Tendo winks at Newt, who tries to look contrite.

Indeed, when they take their seats in front of his desk, Herc holds out a sheet of paper. “I have a list of confirmed buyers of your kaiju samples, Geiszler.”

The weeks since the averted apocalypse have evidently not been kind to Herc Hansen. He looks ten years older and he’s still favoring his right arm; the left one trembles as Newt takes the proffered page. Max hauls himself up from his position at Herc’s feet and plops down in front of Hermann, who pats him hesitantly on the head.

Newt reads and rereads the spreadsheet in disbelief. “Is any of it going to academic institutions, or has it all been taken by uber rich political think-tanks and shadowy mafias?”

“And government research agencies.”

“Yeah, like I said, political think-tanks and shadowy mafias.”

A muscle jumps in Herc’s jaw. “In addition to the chief buyers of the US, Australian, and Russian governments, a few private companies have made bids. You won’t recognize their names, because they’re using umbrella companies or subsidiaries to make the actual purchases. Think Google, Shao Industries, Vladimir Putin’s private enterprises.”

Since 2000, Newt had clocked his PhDs by the Russian election schedule, emerging with a new degree every time Putin inevitably emerged victorious in a presidential or prime ministerial election. He and Putin go way back. Even so, “I don’t think I’m really cut out to work for Vladimir Putin. This can’t be all the samples we have.”

“No,” Herc agrees, “we’re holding some of it back. The Board is trying to be strategic – they’ll hold off a few years on the bulk of it, since the demand will only go up as time goes on.” His tone makes it clear how he feels about that.

“I don’t understand why the First Committee or whatever still has any say in what happens to the Shatterdome. Didn’t they, like, wash their hands of us in our darkest hour of need?”

“They reduced our funding massively, yeah. Really left us in the lurch. But as much as Marshall Pentecost - God rest his soul - talked about the Resistance, everything we _did_ manage to do was with their money. So whatever’s left is legally theirs. The Jaeger tech and especially kaiju remains are worth trillions now, so they’ve decided that selling to the highest bidder is how they wanna play this game. Now me, I have some words to say about that, and I tried saying ‘em, but in the end I’m just following orders. Like we all are.”

“Hm.” Newt crumples the sheet into a ball and tosses it in the general direction of Herc’s wastebasket. In his peripheral vision, Hermann glares ferociously. “Yeah, I think I’ll wait until one of these guys, or someone else, donates some kaiju parts to a university in exchange for their name on a building. You know? In the meantime, I’ll get my research in order, publish some papers, maybe go on a press tour—I have a ton of offers—”

“Speaking of getting your research in order,” Herc says with an evil glint in his eye. “There’s a meeting with the Board and the buyers next Thursday, and I’d like to have all your data to hand. Our intelligence guys are going to have a hell of a time with the redactions before anyone can see it, I’ll bet, but in the meantime I’d like to get a sense of what’s there. Do you think you can manage?”

“Sure,” Newt says faintly, wishing deeply that Hermann had hacked into his server and done it himself like he’d threatened.

“And I had a look at the sample database you sent me—had to get Tendo to show me how to use it. I don’t think that’s gonna cut it. We’re going to have guys with forklifts and OHP PRs of 200 kilos moving these things around, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re trying to say to me.”

“Taste of your own medicine, Geiszler.”

Hermann helpfully mutters, “Over-Head Press – Personal Record – four hundred and forty pounds,” because he trained to be a Jaeger pilot and knows weird jock things and loves to be a know-it-all.

“My point is,” Herc says, “The database isn’t going to work. I need you to go down to the basements and fix these nonsense labels. I can’t sell a ‘Mama Bean’ to Vladimir Putin. I need to know what these samples are, in officially-recognized scientific terms.”

Newt quietly has a stroke in his seat.

“Marshall Hansen, I think you’re being unreasonable.” It’s a testament to his reputation for obsequious authority-worship that everyone in the room, including Buff Military Dude standing guard at the door, does an incredulous little double-take in Hermann’s direction. Except for Newt, who is too busy definitely stroking out and trying to hide it.

Inhale. Exhale. Just breathe, Newt.

“Unreasonable?”

“Yes. Unreasonable. I don’t think you understand just how much biological material has accumulated in those freezers. The Shatterdome has been collecting specimens for over a decade, and up until a few years ago there were entire teams, twenty scientists strong, generating new samples and using all sorts of different conventions. Dr. Geiszler - who, might I add, was only present at the Hong Kong Shatterdome for a fraction of this sample generation - has spent many long nights down there already translating them into something consistent, all of which is encompassed by the database he created for your convenience.”

Inhalexhale inhalexhale inhale exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

“It’s not convenient, though, is it? If everybody has to learn a whole new language just to access that information.”

“SQL is basically English,” Hermann says, sounding affronted.

“I gotta go,” Newt semi-gasps, knocking over his chair and shoulder-checking James on his way out the door.

/////

“Hey, Hermann.”

“Newton. Why are all the lights off?”

Newt takes a deep breath and notices for the first time that the lab around him is unusually dim. “I don’t know?” Inhale. “I just didn’t turn them on on my way in? I guess.” Exhale.

A pair of long legs enter Newt’s field of vision. A box of KimWipes falls into his lap. “Your nose is running,” Hermann informs him quietly, then lays a hand awkwardly on the top of his head. Newt holds a clump of wipes to his nose (they were not designed for this), then surreptitiously swipes one across his forehead and under his streaming eyes.

“I told the Marshall that I would build a Graphical User Interface that will be more convenient for users to work with than SQL, or God forbid a _flat-file spreadsheet_ , which was his suggestion. Can you imagine? He has agreed that if it passes some idiot-proofing tests, he will consider your handover of the kaiju samples complete, and everyone can move on with their lives.”

The wave of relief that slams into Newt is so intense that he almost forgets to be an ass. “You can just say GUI, like a normal person.”

“Yes, you’re very welcome.”

Newt shakes his head to dislodge Hermann’s hand, which seems strangely reluctant to leave. “Seriously. Thanks. It would’ve taken, like, forever to reorganize the samples. I’m already definitely not getting my data files in order by next week.”

Hermann folds himself onto one of Newt’s rolling stools so they’re slightly closer to eye level. “And why is that?”

“Because it’s boring and I’m not motivated to do it?”

“Marshall Hansen said he wanted it by next Thursday for his meeting with the committee.”

“Yeah, but that’s not a real deadline. It’s like a bureaucratic suggestion that will literally have no consequences if I miss it. I’ll do the work to come up with some good fucking manuscripts with exciting fucking conclusions, and maybe hire Tendo to make a PowerPoint to show the new shareholders, and that’s really what they want. Herc doesn’t understand what he’s asking when he asks for all my data for the past ten years. He isn’t prepared for three terabytes worth of FASTA files and five of microscopy images. What the fuck is Herc Hansen gonna do with a FASTA file?”

Hermann sighs. “So he doesn’t need it for the meeting. But someone is going to expect all of it, eventually.”

“Eventually. I love that word.”

“Newton, I was under the impression that you wanted to leave the PPDC,” Hermann snaps, clearly sick of Newt’s devil-may-care-that-I-implode-my-career-again attitude. “For the last several years you’ve been waxing poetic about an end to the necessary evil of ‘selling your labor to the military-industrial complex.’ The night we averted the apocalypse, you got spectacularly drunk and listed all the reasons we should mistrust the PPDC’s motives moving forward. Furthermore, the likelihood of some rich philanthropist buying kaiju parts and donating them to a top-tier xenobiology program is not at all negligible; I thought your plan was to wait for such a thing to come to pass, and follow the corpses. Getting hired often requires references, no?”

Maybe it’s the leftover adrenaline from stroking out in the Marshall’s office, or maybe it’s an impulse from the well-worn fixed action pattern of reacting to genuine Hermanic irritation. Whatever the reason, Newt stands, suddenly feeling more like himself than he has in several weeks.

“References. _References_. Is that a joke?”

Hermann gets to his feet as well, not one to give up his height advantage. “No, it is not a joke. You’ve been a PPDC scientist for a decade. That’s a large employment gap to explain away, should you fail to acquire a complimentary—stop doing that,” Hermann growls, snatching at Newt’s sarcastic talking mouth-hands.

“Oh _really_ , blah blah blah acquire a complimentary—a _reference_? I don’t need a fucking reference, dude! I build neural interfaces out of garbage, I modify mass specs for sensitivity to D-configured amino acids, I invented a whole new brand of immunological warfare even though the PPDC is too entrenched in old-fashioned machismo to understand the utility of weapons unless they’re a thousand feet tall and shiny and slinging guns and swords and—oh yeah, did I mention, I saved the fucking world? How’s that for a Curriculum Vitae – my fucking name. Newton Geiszler, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, PhD, _Rockstar_ , Savior of Humanity.”

Hermann’s hands, having successfully caught and stilled Newt’s own, squeeze slightly. Is he doing that deliberately? Is this a thing that’s happening right now?

“You’re right, Newton. You are an exceptional scientist with a prominent name that’s only going to gain in prominence when people have out-hyped Rangers Beckett and Mori, and are forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel with us.”

“Hey, wait a second,” Newt says, unsure if he’s trying to start a dialogue about the “exceptional scientist” thing or the “scraping the bottom of the barrel” thing.

“You probably could abandon the PPDC right now, with your published body of work as-is, sans recommendation, and be hired anywhere you inquire. But is that going to advance the progress of humanity, of your field, to its fullest extent? Has your motivation in the lab always been absent of any kind of higher design beyond prodding at alien body parts and building complicated machines? I suppose I wouldn’t be surprised if you were a scientific hedonist. Nothing but an _aesthete_.”

“Uuugh, Hermann, you’ve been in my head. You know I care about advancing technological and medical progress to lessen the agony of the human condition, and all that bleeding-heart bullshit. I can’t believe you’re making me say it out loud.”

“Then you should want future scientists to actually _use_ the data you’ve been tirelessly generating for so long.” Hermann pauses, looking up and to the right, like he’s remembering all of the projects Newt had worked on. “Except for the bit about the T-cells. I think you should permanently destroy those data files. I’ll help you.”

“There’s no guarantee it would translate successfully to a mammalian system,” Newt reasons, but secretly is kind of turned on by the fact the Hermann a) agrees with him that the military shouldn’t have certain information and b) is willing to basically commit treason to obscure it. Maybe it’s a side-effect of the Drift. Newt himself is now prone to over-pronating, sometimes tries to lean to the side on an auxiliary that isn’t actually there. Hermann apparently is now capable of distrusting and standing up to authority figures.

Newt looks down to where their hands are still joined, loosely. “I’ve been reading your thesis like a bedtime story,” he blurts.

It sounds exactly like the confession it is. Hermann still doesn’t drop Newt’s hands, and instead attempts aggressively to make eye contact. “Newton, you asked me a few weeks ago what I’m still doing here at the Shatterdome, though my work has always been eminently portable and easily-summarized. The truth is…”

He turns over their palms, examining Newt’s tattoos in what appears to be absentminded consideration. Newt finishes, “You knew that I would freak out and self-destruct like I always do when the fun part of a project is over?”

Hermann looks up, finally catches and holds his eyes. In the dim lighting his eyes are black, darker than his weirdly pale lashes.

“I’ve been waiting for you to finish up here. So we could move on…together.”

The following silence is deafening. Newt knows that the ball’s in his court, but he’s still kind of in a bad place neurologically speaking, and he’s doing the manual-breathing-stress-salivating thing again, and he’s so terrified of ruining this thing that he really really wants to get right. So he stays absolutely motionless like a deer in the fucking headlights, while Hermann just patiently stares him down.

“Do I have…something on my face?”

“Freckles,” Hermann says softly, and Newt is going to give him so much shit about that later, but for now he just leans in to cover Hermann’s mouth with his own.

Hermann dislodges his hand and brings it up to gently cup Newt’s face, runs a thumb over the stubble at his jawline, brushes his tongue in the softest of hints against his lips. Hermann is unfairly good at a lot of things, kissing officially included. Newt tilts his head, grips Hermann’s elbow in an offering of support if needed, and tries to keep up.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for a while,” Hermann says a few minutes later, breathless.

“Me too,” Newt says, even though he doesn’t need to.

/////

“Aw, dude! The guy who came up with that fun new clustering algorithm is gonna be at this conference too!”

Hermann peers over his reading glasses at Newt’s tablet screen. “Since when do you care about clustering? Did you casually learn a seventh esoteric scientific subject because you were attending an academic conference one weekend?”

“Nice, dude, academic tourism. That’s actually a concept I can get behind.”

“You would. Being the equivalent of an academic vagrant.”

“Hey, I take that as a compliment. But yeah, no, clustering is kind of a big deal in biology. And I thought you might care. You know, stats shit.”

“Unsupervised learning?” Hermann says darkly. “Do not joke. And please buckle your seatbelt.”

Newt complies with good humor, tuning out the flight attendant’s spiel about what to do in case of a crash-landing in the ocean. Newt knows too much about physics now to have any optimism about that hypothetical situation.

“Hey, Hermann?”

“Hmm?”

“I’m glad you’re around to be my superego.”

Hermann rolls his eyes. “You’re a grown man, Newton. You can take care of yourself, I’m sure.” He drops his arm, palm up, on the armrest between them. Newt takes the hint and laces their fingers together.

“Maybe I can,” Newt allows. He doesn’t fall asleep shaking anymore, and when he wakes up in a cold sweat feeling like a sentient fetus that just strangled itself with its own umbilical cord, well, Hermann’s right there feeling the same super-weird super-specific pain. Some things will never return entirely to baseline, but Newt knows biology. Knows compensatory mechanisms and homeostasis.

Bodies and brains are designed to cope. They know how to keep going, together.


End file.
